Nicolai Lilin - Free Fall

‘Let me speak with your commanding officer, private!’ Nosov yelled.

‘I think Lieutenant Kuznecov is dead, sir. I think…’

‘Son, you think so or you know your lieutenant is dead?’ The captain tried to enunciate his words. ‘Can you confirm his death for me?’

‘Yes, sir, I confirm; he has a hole in his chest and he’s not breathing…’

‘Then find me the highest ranking soldier among you. I need to speak with him immediately!’

The sound of confused voices amidst gunfire came through the handset of the radio. The soldiers were calling to each other; all signs indicated that chaos had taken over.

Then an awful voice, raspy and low, came on:

‘Sergeant Major Kopchik, at your service!’

‘Sergeant, gather your men and get the fuck out of there, now,’ Nosov growled. ‘If you can’t respond to the attack get down to the road. If your vehicles are still intact, take them and return!’

‘But I’m not authorised to give the unit orders, sir! Lieutenant Kuznecov is in command here!’

‘Well, it appears that you are not very well informed, Sergeant. Your lieutenant died in battle. If you take a look around, his body should be somewhere nearby…’

There was a long pause at the other end, then in the distance you could hear the sergeant spit out a vile epithet, cursing everyone and everything. Then he picked up the handset again:

‘I confirm, sir, our commander has fallen in battle! What do I do?’

‘Take your unit to safety, Sergeant. Clear the road – we’ll come down to you, but make sure we don’t have anyone in our way!’

‘But the terrorists in the woods have…’ the sergeant tried to protest.

‘You have no chance of sustaining a fire fight against the terrorists… Get out of there while your cars are still in one piece. Retreat immediately, that’s an order!’

‘Yes, sir, I’ll initiate retreat!’

‘And hurry up, otherwise they’ll get all of you!’ Nosov replaced the handset, looked at us in desperation and said:

‘Someone explain to me… Trapped by four fucking shepherds shooting a bullet or two… I mean, they don’t even have an RPG to hit the cars. But our heroes are already in trouble – they don’t know what to do and they’ve even lost their lieutenant… How the fuck are we fighting this war?’

Nosov ordered us into the cars. We had lost six men; five others were wounded. We loaded everything into the three functioning vehicles: the wounded, our dead, the ammo, the drugs and everything else we had found in the mosque. We put the prisoners, however, on top of the cars, binding them to the side hooks on the armour – that way, we hoped, nobody would try to attack us again.

We left quickly, watching the surrounding woods and mountains with suspicion, as if we were expecting them to start moving at any second.

Once we were back on base we realised that one of the prisoners had died; it was the old imam, who hadn’t been able to endure the discomforts of the trip. The others weren’t doing so well either, but they still gave signs of life.

The OMON guy who’d been hit by a grenade during the avalanche had fainted, and the helicopter whisked him off to the military hospital that was set up for the most serious cases – he had lost a lot of blood.

We saboteurs shut ourselves up in our container to rest.

I took a long bath in the iron vat behind the kitchen, and then I climbed into the bunk next to Spoon, who had already been snoring for a while.

I slept for a long time, and when I woke up Nosov was sitting at the table, eating out of a pot and drinking cognac straight from the bottle. Moscow was next to him, chewing on a piece of bread. He looked like a little homeless kid.

I got up, opened a jar and, using my fork, pulled a hunk of stewed meat from the pan, where it was mixed with fat and God knows what else. I dunked it into my jar before taking a bite.

I was standing up, enjoying my food, when Nosov looked me in the eyes, serious, and said:

‘Today the order from the division commander came: you’re fired, criminal…’

I set the jar on the table and sat down with them, unable to say a word. I felt soft, as if I were made of cotton inside.

‘Starting today you’re free again. Live, do whatever you want…’ Moscow smiled. ‘But never forget your brothers…’

Just then Zenith came in. He was walking with an arm over his stomach; it was obvious that he had something hidden under his jacket.

‘So, you’re abandoning us, I hear. Well, how about one last bender first?’ He opened his jacket and pulled out some bottles of vodka, uncorked one with his teeth and took a long drink.

‘Hey, leave some for me too!’ Spoon shouted, leaping up from his bunk.

Shoe and Deer came over too, laughing like a couple of fools.

‘What’s so funny, soldiers?’ Nosov asked, pretending to be angry, still chewing.

‘I think we won’t be alone at Kolima’s goodbye party,’ Shoe said. ‘Our Deer has made quite an impression on the cook!’ and he shouldered Deer so hard he fell down. Everyone burst out laughing.

I really didn’t know how to act. It was the last time I would be with my team; the last time I would see all the men together. Over the months I had often thought about the fact that my discharge day would come, but I had never imagined what it would be like. Sure, I had seen it happen other times, when friends or other people I knew only by sight left, but I’d never believed that one day I would be in their place. I seldom thought of the future; maybe somewhere inside I believed that I was never going back. I had expected to die in that war… And yet here I was with my friends, celebrating the end of my military service.

It didn’t occur to me that it was a special occasion, the last chance I would have to ask my comrades about their lives, or to tell them the stories I’d always wanted to… Thinking back on it now I realise that, like an idiot, I wasted that moment, as if I didn’t know that the next day I was going to be far away, far from my comrades with whom – because of the war – I had formed an intense bond. I don’t know why, but at that moment I didn’t have any of these thoughts in my head; I drank, I got drunk and I watched my friends’ faces grow blurry and distant until I passed out.

At five in the morning a military car would take me to another camp, and from there I would get on the plane that was finally going to take me back home. That was the last thing I remembered from the night before…

At five in the morning, however, I was still so drunk that I couldn’t drag myself from one bunk to another. My head was spinning like a giant propeller, my comrades’ voices, shouting and joking, throbbed in my ears. The moment a thought appeared in my head, vomit lurched into my throat, as if the workings of my brain somehow irritated my stomach.

I could hear Nosov describing yet another of his adventures in one of the many wars he had been in, while a few bunks away Deer was making love to the young cook, and Shoe and Spoon were teasing him, throwing empty clips at him, for a few laughs… I was in an endless delirium, like a sudden fall off a precipice, like a feast in a time of plague.

I remember that at some point two soldiers I’d never seen before lifted me up from the bed; one of them took my papers, the other my bag, and they carefully dragged me to the door of the container. One of them suddenly dropped me – I fell to the ground and hit my head. I didn’t know if he’d done it on purpose or not, but either way I didn’t feel any pain.

The captain got up from the table, where he was still sitting with Zenith and Moscow, took a bottle of vodka and a pack of cigarettes and gave them to the soldier with these words: